French President Nicolas Sarkozy edged ahead in polls on Tuesday, capturing votes from the far-right after a crackdown on Islamists boosted his security credentials just ahead of the presidential election.
Category Archives: France
French Muslim women defy veil ban
The Toronto Star reports.
Paris: Muslim school pupil is sent home because her long skirt ‘conveyed religious values’
A secondary school student near Paris was accused of wearing provocative clothing and sent back home. The school thought her skirt was too long, and conveyed religious values.
“Other students come dressed up as hippies or goths and nobody says anything,” the girl, Khadija, told the French daily Le Parisien, “but I’m not even allowed to wear a gypsy skirt.”
“If I had come to school wearing a veil I would have understood their reaction,” says Khadija, who is a student at the Edmond-Rostand secondary school at Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône near Paris.
On Monday, Khadija was sent home from school for wearing a long skirt that according to the school conveyed religious values.
“It was a beautiful day, I wore a long skirt,” says Khadija, “the headmistress told me I was being provocative and sent me home.”
Via Islam in Europe
French government bans four speakers from attending UOIF conference, ‘regrets’ invitation to Tariq Ramadan
France said Thursday it had banned four Muslim preachers from entering the country to attend an Islamic conference, saying their “calls for hatred and violence seriously damage republican principles”.
France also “regrets” that Swiss intellectual Tariq Ramadan has been invited to the meeting of the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (UOIF), a statement from Foreign Minister Alain Juppe and Interior Minister Claude Gueant said.
Akrima Sabri, Ayed Bin Abdallah al-Qarni, Safwat al-Hijazi and Abdallah Basfar are banned from entering France, while Qatari preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Mahmud al-Masri “decided not to come”, it said.
Don’t be fooled. Europe’s far-right racists are not discerning
Opportunistic words of love for Jews and Israel cannot disguise the European far right’s toxic rhetoric of hatred, writes Ann Karpf.
Scholars slam France over Qaradawi ban
France has come under fierce criticism from an international body of Muslim scholars over denying prominent scholar Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi entry into the southern European country to attend a major Islamic conference.
“We are surprised, and we admonish France for refusing to grant Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi a visa,” Sheikh Ali al-Qaradaghi, the secretary general of the International Union for Muslim Scholars (IUMS), told Agence France Presse (AFP) on Tuesday, March 27. “He is a moderate scholar who contributed to combating extremism in Islamic thoughts.”
UOIF defends Qaradawi, opposes Sarkozy’s ban, accuses government of capitulation to Front National
The Union of French Islamic Organisations is surprised at the current controversy provoked by a statement by the National Front spreading inaccurate information about Sheikh Qaradawi when he has visited France and Europe on several occasions.
The UOIF regrets that the climate of suspicion toward the Muslim community is the source of a controversy over information that has been available for months.
Sheikh Qaradawi is a man of peace and tolerance who has worked for openness and moderation and whose positions are always in favour of justice and peoples’ freedom. He was received by Pope Jean-Paul II and for several years has carried out work on interfaith dialogue with Jewish and Christian communities around the world.
He exercises a positive influence in the Muslim world and is continually attacked by extremist movements because of his modern positions in favour of democracy, women’s rights and dialogue between civilisations.
French government will bar entry to Qaradawi, says Sarkozy aide
Qaradawi addresses mass rally in Tahrir Square in February last year
The French government will deny entry to an influential Egyptian preacher if he accepts an invitation from an Islamic organisation to visit France next month, a close aide to President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Sunday.
Sarkozy, who is running for re-election, has announced a crackdown on people who follow extremist Islamic messages on radical websites in the wake of a spate of killings by an al Qaeda-inspired gunman.
His aide, Henri Guaino said the government would take measures to block the entry of Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi if he seeks to take up the invitation from the Union of French Islamic Organisations (UOIF), a Muslim umbrella group.
“The French government does not want any extremist preachers entering its territory,” Guaino, a special advisor and speech writer to Sarkozy, told French Radio J.
Riposte Laïque leaders convicted of inciting hatred against Muslims
Two officials of the Riposte Laïque website, which presents itself as the defender of the principle of secularism, were given fines today by the criminal court in Paris for inciting hatred against Muslims.
EDL leader announces formation of new political party in May, aims to emulate Wilders and Le Pen
The leader of a British anti-Islamist group said on Friday his populist protest movement, which critics say represents a new far right in Britain, would form a political party in May. Stephen Lennon, head of the English Defence League (EDL), said the three-year-old grassroots group wanted to move on from holding street demonstrations to contesting elections.
“The British political anti-Islamist party will be launched in May at our Luton demonstration,” Lennon told Reuters, saying the new body would be called the Freedom Party. At the Luton demonstration, the whole country will hear an anti-Islamist political party that gives everyone an option in a non-racist way – the opposite to the British National Party.”